by Tetyana Denford (Author)
I really don't know what I'm doing, I said.
Well, the mother replied, the thing that you will feel (but never understand),
is that mothering someone is like standing in shifting sands, watching the sea.
You come to the edge, and you let it touch a part of you,
and then you mourn the tide as it slips away,
silently watching as it takes new shapes, and comes back to you.
So you promise to stay.
In this second book in a series of themed 'Conversation' books, we see how destabilizing and human motherhood is, but also how wonderfully ordinary it is too. Normalize revealing how complicated it is to talk about motherhood, and how little time we give ourselves to take the time to understand our part in it. Because motherhood and womanhood are linked in a marriage that's strange and wonderful and heartbreaking and captivating and soul-destroying and lonely and exhausting and it will upend your serenity and make you question who you are every single day.
And that's okay.
In "Conversation With Motherhood", Tetyana tries to talk about the complications and nuances women experience when they choose to have children, even mother other people's children. These are universal narratives, without labels or stereotypes, without judge or jury, and without trendy explanations. It's the honest and true parts of ourselves that even we find hard to understand. But we try, and we talk, and we keep mothering.